


Closer by TheHousekeeper

by TheHousekeeper



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, None - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-24 00:29:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12001155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHousekeeper/pseuds/TheHousekeeper
Summary: She wants to touch him. Wants to kiss him. Wants to hold him. Wants to hate him. Wants to hurt him. Wants to love him. Wants to lie. “I missed you,” she says, instead, and she starts to cry.





	Closer by TheHousekeeper

**Author's Note:**

> Oops, forgot to post this here for awhile.
> 
> This fic was conceived while listening to the Chainsmokers' Closer – it's a treasure hunt! Find all the references to the lyrics and you get brownie points.

L.A.’s okay. Buffy wishes she could stay away from parts that bleed bad associations, the dark streets with their dirty teens, the diners and the cheap apartments. But she’s the Slayer, and no matter how much they might remind her of that miserable summer, of Angel-turned-Angelus-turned-Angel – _nope nope nope_ – they’re where she lives. The darkness: the air she breathes, her fight, her home.

She is decidedly less at home here, in a trendy hotel bar, wearing her one remaining sexy dress. Under the purple lights, everyone is clean, and dressed in pressed, shiny clothing, with product slicking their hair. Everyone has reflections in the bar mirror. Their images break and rearrange themselves behind chrome shelves stocked with Hendricks and Macallan and green absinthe and blue curacao.

These are things she used to take for granted when she went out for the night. Less so, now. She stares into the mirror, lets her eyes unfocus with abstraction and exhaustion. Lets herself soak in the martinis, the champagne, the men in their dark suits and the women in tight dresses they have to tug down over their asses, their expensive hair and expensive teeth and expensive drinks.

God, she hopes this guy will pay for her mojito.

Except her phone buzzes on the black bar, lying next to her glass in a slowly-growing puddle of condensation. Even with the air conditioning blasting, throwing her skin into goosebumps, the atmosphere is clammy and heavy. _Hey it’s Anthony. Ssorry had to work late big case you know? ill call u._

He won’t, which would be all right, since she’s exchanged maybe a dozen words with him total and he’s just an intermittent customer at her coffee shop, except she has – she checks her purse – six dollars and forty-three cents in a bar where cocktails cost – “Hey, how much do I owe you?” she asks the bartender as he pauses in front of her. He’s applying a blowtorch to a thin slice of grapefruit, and he places it fussily on the edge of a highball glass before he even looks up. He has a thin handlebar mustache, oiled into gravity-defying curves.

“Nothing. Guy over there paid,” he says, indicating about half the room with an extremely imprecise jerk of his head.

Great. Still, gift horse, mouth – hey, she’s good at not looking, she’s all about the not-looking. “Which guy?”

“Skinny dude with dyed hair.”

Buffy vaguely scans the mirror, but if anyone has green or red or weirdly pink hair, the purple light is disguising it. She opens her mouth to ask the bartender, but he’s moved off now, delivering the highball glass and its ridiculous bruléed grapefruit to a square-jawed man with studied stubble, and instead she sees –

She fumbles picking up her phone, knocking over her glass. Ice scatters across the shiny black bar. She has to get away, get back to her small but not-terrible apartment. Her purse – should she tip? Or did – Skip patrol tonight, she thinks, go to bed, open the coffee shop in the morning. Get back to her job, her iced coffees, commiserating with her coworkers about their young, broke lives in L.A., her sunshine, her _life_ and yeah, maybe it’s not glamorous but she has this whole _life_ now, where she wears sunglasses and makes frappes –

Spike hasn’t moved.

She’s standing now. Her stool teeters dangerously. She catches it before it tips all the way over.

She didn’t realize that she’d expected him to come over as soon as she panicked and made for the door. Instead: just looking, at her. He’ll let her walk out, if she wants to.

She closes her eyes. Wants to think, _My life is already complicated enough_ , but it isn’t, really. She may be at home in the grimy recesses of the night, but she tells herself now that it’s because someone has to carry a torch into all the dark corners of the world. She even believes it. It’s why she’s working at a nice café on a wide street not far from Paramount Studios, rather than at a diner so greasy that she’d slip on the floors in her thick rubber soles. She talks to Dawn once a week, Giles sometimes, Willow sometimes, Xander a little less.

The panic, the confusion, the wave-crash of remembered misery – it was all just instinctive. She opens her eyes. Looks.

No reason why he should look different, so he doesn’t.

Her body is quiet, now, next to her stool. Spike gets up, walks over, stands beside her. Reaches past her to pick up the fallen glass. He wants something to do with his hands, she thinks. She wraps hers around her elbows.

“Are you –” She cuts herself off. _Okay?_ She almost laughs, instead. She wants to, because then he’ll probably laugh, too, and they can laugh at themselves and break the tension and sit at the bar together, for a few minutes.

But she doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t either. Inside the shell of numbness that comes from surprise, she’s angry. She wants to touch him. Wants to kiss him. Wants to hold him. Wants to hate him. Wants to hurt him. Wants to love him. Wants to lie.

“I missed you,” she says, instead, and she starts to cry.

Spike makes a quiet noise, maybe a snort. Buffy clenches her jaw, forces the tears away, takes her hand from her mouth. “Right,” she says. “Sorry.” But blinking her vision clear, she realizes that it wasn’t a snort; it was something else, something more complicated, something that matches the tender, surprised, fearful, grieving look on his face.

He picks up a hand, raises it partway, drops it again. “Buffy,” he grinds out.

Suddenly the idea of sitting back down at the bar is excruciating. “We – we should go,” she says. “Can we go?” He nods. “We can take my car.”

“Your car?”

The payments are why she can’t get a bigger place, or one closer to work. She doesn’t need a car, really. It’s L.A. and everyone has one, but she could take the bus, listen to music, watch people get on and off, stare at nothing. But the car looks just like her Mom’s SUV. Buried now in the remains of a smashed garage a hundred and fifty feet underground, at the spot on the Earth that used to be 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale, California 93257.

“It’s a Land Rover,” she says, like that matters. Just to say something, something that doesn’t mean anything. Just to make herself take another breath.

“Like your mum’s,” Spike says, instinctively, and good thing about that last breath, she thinks, because she might not get another one for awhile.

What did you _do_ with all this information about a person, when they went away? What did you do with your knowledge of how they stood when taming their curls, of their habit of eating chicken wings with neat, tiny bites and lying on the bed with their boots on? Of what kind of car their mother drove? It became meaningless; it didn’t refer to anything anymore. Her head is full of letters addressed to a demolished house. His face left no forwarding address.

She regrets admitting that she missed him.

Outside, they walk three blocks in silence to a lucky parking spot on a side street, in silence unlock her car, in silence get in and shut the doors and buckle their seatbelts – or she does – and start the engine and stare at the bumper of the Prius parked in front of them.

“You parallel parked.”

“Yeah.”

“Couldn’t do that before.”

“No.”

This is intolerable.

The view through the windshield blurs until all she can see is the smears of streetlights against black, and sometimes headlights humming past. She was – if not happy, then content, an hour ago, which is more than most people ever get – and now she feels this awful sick tide in her chest, like everything is being sucked down and out of her and what’s taking its place is hot and acidic. Spike’s there, and, as usual, he’s easy to blame.

“ _Say something_ ,” she screams, and he doesn’t, and doesn’t. She thinks about just getting out of the car and running, away. And she doesn’t, either. She breathes, instead. _This isn’t working,_ she thinks. _Start again._

“I didn’t get a ch – I wanted…” Okay, okay, start again, _again_. “Thank you.”

It seems to surprise him; she sees him start a little out of the corner of her eye. “I mean, that’s what you say when someone _dies to save the world_ , right?”

“You’d know, pet,” he says, and she wants to cry again. His voice. Scraped raw by tenderness, like a flank steak pounded with a mallet. She wants to contradict him, say, _No, I wouldn’t_ , but she’s been okay long enough to recognize bitterness when it makes its occasional visitation. Says nothing, for awhile. There isn’t a puff of moving air in the car, not a breath, and her legs are slick with sweat, sweat beading on her nose, her neck, her ribs beneath her bra.

“You knew, then?” he asks. “That I was alive?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t come to look for me.” His voice is neutral, just stating a fact, but she’s back in familiar territory immediately. He makes her so angry, so easily.

“It’s _my_ fault? You were _dead_ , Spike. Disintegrated. Flesh, bone, hair, soul. Why would I expect you to come _back_ , to just – hang around? Four _years_. You’re the one who didn’t – I had to find out third-hand. From Giles. From _Angel_. What is _wrong_ with you?”

“I didn’t mean –” He stops. Her anger is gone, suddenly. She closes her eyes, lets her head fall back against the seat.

It’s so _hard_. They’re so unsure of each other. He feels like a stranger, one she’s not sure she cares to know. “I miss you,” she says, helplessly, feeling like she’s speaking to someone she isn’t sure is there. He makes that soft sound again, only now she thinks it might be a sob. She is dismayed that she misread him, before. She is devastated to think he might not know her as well as he once did.

“I work at a coffee shop,” she tells him, quickly. “I usually take the afternoon shift, three p.m. to close. And I have an apartment. A little one, and it’s far from work, but it’s clean, and I have it to myself. I cook sometimes. I can make omelettes now, and, and roast chicken, and my coworkers bought me a blender for my birthday, so I make smoothies in the morning. Dawn is –”

She stops abruptly. To talk about Dawn means Giles, Willow, Xander, all the places she isn’t. It means telling about something more meaningful than the fact that she puts kale in her breakfast smoothies. Her words die away into the hot, fabric-muffled interior of the car.

Spike doesn’t let her evade, though. She had thought he might, with this new, strange care they’re taking with each other’s feelings. “Why?” he asks. “Why aren’t you with them?”

“I just… don’t do well, with the other Slayers,” she says. “As one of…” _the crowd_ , she doesn’t say. She’s too intense. Spent too long with a weight on her that crushed out the ability to be just one of the girls, a dutiful member of a team. Too long being _special_. She hates herself for this. “L.A.’s been pretty quiet since –” She looks at him and quickly away, wondering if she’ll ever manage to finish a sentence. “So I said I’d come here, take care of anything that needs taking care of, patrol every night, live on my own for awhile. It works.”

“You patrol by yourself?” She wants to think there is concern in his voice, but she isn’t sure, and between that and the question itself, she’s irritated again.

“I can handle it,” she snaps.

“That’s not what I…”

For the first time, Buffy realizes that Spike’s strange silences, his aloofness, are because he, too, is struggling to navigate this conversation. She’s too used to him being confident, assertive – or at least blunt. Still confounded by him, she softens.

“What _did_ you mean, Spike?” she asks. “What do you want? Tell me what you want.” A thought comes to her. When he saw her at the bar, he paid for her drink, but he hadn’t told the bartender to let her know. He didn’t approach her. Wasn’t expecting to run into her. She asks quietly, “Do you want to forget you ever saw me?”

“No!” he says, startled enough that she’s convinced, and takes an unneeded breath. Resets. “You must miss them.” When she tilts her head at him, he clarifies, “The Scoobies. Not the other Slayers.”

Shrugging again, she says, “I do, but not… it doesn’t hurt, you know? Like an old scar. We talk, and… it feels okay.”

“Well,” he says, with the first expression on his face that she sort of recognizes, “I miss ‘em all like hell myself and all that rot, but I’d be perfectly satisfied never to see the lot of them again.”

At first, she isn’t sure whether to stare at him in horror or punch away the hint of humour around his quirked mouth, but in the end, she finds herself throwing her head back and laughing until she can’t breathe. He’s laughing, too, she thinks, but she can’t really hear over the sound of her own hysterics.

As their gusts of hilarity start snuffling themselves out, Spike says quietly, “’Cept Dawn.”

“Yeah,” says Buffy. “Except Dawn.”

She feels better about him, now. The silence between them is that of two people who agree on something.

Beside her, Spike relaxes into his seat for the first time, letting his legs and arms loosen, taking up space.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she says, impulsively.

“Yeah?” His fingers twitch toward the inside of his duster – God, he’s still wearing the duster. “What’ll it be, Slayer – dancing, drinking, or dusting?”

“There’s a cemetery up by Burbank. It’s small, but… Want to kill something?”

“Yeah, all right,” he says, casually, but he’s grinning.

\---

“Ugh, just die already!” Buffy spins, knocking the vampire on her right backwards with an elbow while she tries to dig a stake into the one sneaking up behind her. The vampire, a fang-faced, greasy-haired woman in business attire, dodges and comes at her again. Buffy tries to give herself some space, wipe the sweat away from her eyes. The air feels like soup.

“Thinks she’s got that part covered, Slayer,” Spike calls from a few headstones over, throwing the college-age vampire he’s fighting into tree.

“Then she should die _again_ ,” Buffy says, through a fist to the face. She’s laughing before she’s upright again, which seems to confuse both the vampire and Spike.

“And just what’s so funny, pet?”

“We’ve both –” she gasps for air, still laughing – “died – _twice_. We’re worse than _they_ are!” She manages to get herself sufficiently under control to flip over the business exec, stake her, pause, then jerk her arm backwards and impale the vampire she’d elbowed. Grimacing, she gets to her feet. Spike, finished with his fight, is coming toward her.

“Who buries someone in a pencil skirt, anyway?” Buffy grouses, brushing vampire dust off her knees. The damp air is making it cling to her skin, her hands. Her clothes are stuck to her back and thighs and butt. “Look, when I die, can you make sure they bury me in something I can fight in?”

Looking up, she sees Spike’s face, and feels like someone dumped ice water into her chest cavity.

“Oh,” she says, her hand coming up to her mouth. “Oh, shit. Spike, I –”

He’s quick, though. Gets himself under control, holds up a hand to cut her off. “Don’t.”

Every time. Every time they’ve gotten close, they throw one another off-balance. There’s too much history, too much that a comment, a thought, a look, can bring back into the light. The cemetery is quiet now, the heavy air breathless, the grass motionless and unhealthy in the light of distant streetlights. “Are we ever going to be able to – talk? Just talk to each other?”

He closes his eyes, breathes out, lets his head fall forward. “Don’t know. I… hope so.”

“Really?” she asks, distantly surprised to find she is furious again, shaking with it, burning with it. “You hope we can talk. You sure act like it. Why didn’t you come find me? Why let me think for _months_ that you were dead? I’d think _you_ , of all people would know what it’s like –” Even smoldering with rage, she knows that’s a low blow, but she can’t take it back, not with tears now so thick that she can barely understand the words coming out of her own mouth. “I missed you _so much_. I thought of all kinds of excuses for you. But you _still_ didn’t call, or find me, or email, or write me a goddamn letter – God, a fucking _homing pigeon_ would have worked – so I have to think you were just being cruel, on purpose, or maybe you forgot how not to be evil –”

He’s there, in front of her, crushing her cheek against the lapel of his jacket, left hand cradling her head, stroking her hair. “– I hate you, I hate you, I hate you I hate you I hate you –”

“I know,” he says, “I know you do.”

She sobs, loud, harsh, headache-inducing sobs, gripping two fistfuls of his jacket. In the damp summer night, the smoke-leather smell of him is so strong it’s almost nauseating, and her cheek is stickily glued to his lapel as if it’s a vinyl car seat, and the oppressiveness of her own heat trapped against her face is overwhelming. She wants to push away, get some air, but she likes his hands, his voice.

“Sh, I know, I know, pet, I’m here,” he’s crooning, and she thinks that she’s being unfair to him, because she’s putting all this on him at once, because she’s leaning on him like a child, because, while she’s crying, he has no one to comfort him.

“No,” she tries to say, but it comes out garbled. She just wants him to pick her up and carry her to the car, and drive her home and tuck her into bed. But she is the Slayer, and he is what he is, and he’s done what he’s done, and she doesn’t forgive him.

So she forces down the next sob, ruthlessly, and steps back from him, wiping her eyes and avoiding his gaze.

“I’m sorry,” he says, helplessly.

There’s no good way to respond to that, so she doesn’t.

It’s still early – barely ten – and she doesn’t know what to do now. Unreasonably, she’s worried that if she lets him go, heads home, she won’t see him again. Crying didn’t help; now that they’re separated again, the distance seems unbridgeable, the silence awkward. Rather than feeling cleaned out, newly hollowed, from the sobbing, she just feels congested, her nose and face and chest and head.

He clears his throat. “Hungry?”

“Yeah, actually,” she says, surprised to find that she really is. She’d skipped dinner to make the long commute home after work and prep for her date with Anthony.

Briefly, a smile moves from one corner of Spike’s mouth to the other. Wiping at her eyes again, Buffy feels her face slick with sweat and tears. “I’m super gross, though. I think I’ve got a change of clothes in the car.”

She does, and luckily they’re not so clean that she feels bad getting into them all covered with sweat and dirt and vampire dust. Through the car window, as she shucks off her soaked bra and exchanges it for one that’s at least marginally drier, she can see the back of Spike’s head. He stares off into the cemetery, one hand clenched around a stake, white hair glowing under the nearest streetlight.

It’s the first time she’s been alone since she saw him across the bar, and after she laces up the pair of beat-up Converse that have somehow survived since high school, she remains sitting, head hanging between her knees, scalp pressed against the passenger seat in front of her. She’d wanted a minute to sort through her thoughts, but her thoughts are a disastrous swirl of confusion, and instead she finds herself thinking of nothing. Of the hot-car air pooling in her chest, the oppressive fabric-muffled silence and the heat, always the heat.

She opens the door, which doesn’t change anything, gets out and walks around to the driver’s seat. “Where are we going?”

\---

He directs her to a diner, tile floors and plastic booths. She’s been trying to avoid diners, and she resents him for bringing her to one before she realizes that there’s no possible way he could know how she feels about L.A. diners. When she was seventeen, depressed, running away from everything she knew, working double shifts and dodging slaps to her ass from unshaven men and drunk guys who were sipping coffee she’d served them at three in the morning, he was fleeing with Dru to South America.

It surprises her, that there’s anything left he doesn’t know about her.

This one’s clean, and blessedly, goosebump-inducingly cool, the stainless steel bar sparkling and the waitresses chipper and sweet. It isn’t until she opens the menu that Buffy remembers she doesn’t have ten dollars to her name. Does she even have any food at her apartment? Yes – a couple of cans of beans, some tomatoes that are starting to go soft, cereal, half a loaf packaged bread, the end of a jar of peanut butter. Enough to get her to Friday.

“What’ll you have, Slayer?” She looks up to find Spike raising an eyebrow at her, the patient, middle-aged waitress poised with a pencil hovering above her notepad.

Buffy shies away from Spike’s gaze, folding up her menu. “Um – just a Coke is fine,” she says, then holds out the menu for the waitress, smiles. “Thanks.”

Spike snorts. “She’ll have the blueberry pancakes, side of bacon, and I’ll take two eggs, over easy, with hash browns and sausage. Thanks, love. Could you bring some hot sauce for the taters?” He smiles winningly, and the waitress melts at his charm.

“Of course, dear.” She takes the menus, and Spike looks back at Buffy.

“My treat.”

It feels like defeat, saying it, but she’s gotten past the point of useless pride. “Thanks.”

“Ought to eat better,” Spike says, frowning. He fiddles with his fork. “Look a little peaked. You alright? Been – unhappy?” Immediately, he winces, as if he doesn’t think he has a right to ask.

Maybe he doesn’t. She doesn’t know.

“No,” she says, instinctively. Not that she’s thought about it much – her life is liveable, at the moment, as long as she doesn’t let herself indulge in long periods of self-reflection, but – “No, I don’t think I am.”

“Good.” He nods, too much, too quickly. “That’s good.”

_I miss you_ , Buffy thinks, though this time she avoids saying it. It feels like the only thing she has been able to think for hours, as if it’s a song stuck in her head.

“Give me a minute?” she asks, getting up.

In the bathroom, she splashes lukewarm water on her face, dribbles some on the back of her neck. It heats immediately. She feels as though her body is steaming in the air conditioning. She’ll turn entirely to mist and drift away.

When she returns, Spike is staring through the window at the bright L.A. night, people walking by with their hands shoved in their pockets, or laughing and leaning on each other, motorcycles and car horns and police sirens. Buffy stops at the edge of the table, not sitting yet. “Are you staying?”

“Huh?” He drags his gaze back to her.

“Are you staying here? In L.A., I mean. Or will you…”

“I was…” He clears his throat, still staring at her. She feels naked, hot, grubby. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I’ll leave right now, if you’d like, or…”

Why must he always make it so difficult for her? She doesn’t want to be the one to decide, for once, doesn’t want to be calling the shots. A second, two, three, he stares at her, as she looks past him, impassive. The moment he realizes she isn’t going to say anything, he turns his head aside in a quick jerk to hide his face, or whatever is on it. He breathes out, and then starts shuffling out of the booth.

Squeezing her eyes closed, she grinds out, “No. Don’t – don’t leave.”

He says nothing, hesitating, half turned sideways with his hands braced on the table and the back of the seat. She slides into the booth, sits, picks up her fork. Puts it down again. Sips at the Coke that has arrived in her absence. Lays her hands flat on the table and flexes her fingertips into it.

He settles back down. “Okay.”

“As if it’s that simple.” A few of her knuckles are scraped from earlier, not bloody, but raw and messy. She picks at the torn skin. His hand – big, with square fingertips, and chipped black polish – stills hers.

“It is,” he says. “Right now, it is. Okay?” Still looking down at the table, she can watch his hand as it rises to cup her cheek. “Okay?”

Closing her eyes, she nods, and the motion pushes her cheek further into his hand, so she gives up and presses his palm harder against her skin. With her eyes closed, it’s just a hand, room-temperature, just a hand, as if it’s disconnected from anything. Just five fingers and a palm of dry skin that she can maneuver across her face, that she can hold and manipulate and press her lips to.

He makes a small sound. Her eyes fly open, and the look in his, the way his mouth has fallen slightly open, makes her flush with warmth. In the cool air, she burns.

She kisses his palm again, more deliberately this time.

“Pancakes,” says the waitress, shoving a plate between them. “Side of bacon. Eggs, hash browns, and sausage. I’ll be right back with your hot sauce.”

“Not sure I need it now,” says Spike, smirking, as the waitress moves off.

Buffy rolls her eyes, trying hard not to smile while she does so. When she fails, she can’t really bring herself to care.

After they eat, as Spike digs some cash out of his pocket, Buffy swirls the last soggy hash brown through a puddle of ketchup on his plate.

“Ready to go home?” Spike reaches across the table and drains the end of her Coke.

Buffy shakes her head, then looks up. “Where are you staying?”

“Motel near Venice Beach. Just checked in yesterday.”

She wants, desperately, to know where he’s been, but there’s no easy way to ask the question while specifying an upper bound on time spent, so it would lead inevitably back… to here, actually. L.A.

“Let’s go.” She stands, as he blinks in confusion. “To your _motel_.” He smirks again, and she rolls her eyes again, and feels a little better again. It’s hard to be as annoyed as she wants to be when even his obnoxiousness feels like home. “No, you pig. To get your stuff?”

“And… where will I be bringing this ‘stuff’?”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “My apartment.” She waits. “I _know_ your eyebrows don’t go that high without you _really_ putting in some effort, you know that, right? Save those forehead muscles a workout. God knows they don’t get to furrow in thought too often.”

“Slayer –”

“Car. Now.”

“Buffy –”

“ _No_. We are going to drive to your motel, we are going to pick up your things, we are going to drive back to my apartment, and you are going to stay there while I sleep for –” she checks the clock behind the coffee bar – “four hours. I have the opening shift in the morning.”

He frowns. “Thought you said you normally close.”

She tries really, really hard not to melt at the fact that he paid such close attention. Then again, she isn’t sure why she’s surprised. “Most of the time, yes. Not tomorrow.”

“Can I… come?” At her incredulous look, he splutters, “You’ll be leaving before dawn, yeah? I can come, hang out until your shift’s over, then find a tunnel or sommat to take me back.”

“Spike. We can’t even manage a _conversation_. And you want to, what? Sit in a corner, drink a latte, read the newspaper, for _seven hours_?”

“Buy you lunch after,” he offers.

She literally cannot afford to turn him down, and she hates him for knowing it, for taking advantage of it. “Why?”

“Like I said, you ought to eat –”

“No, dumbass. _Why_?”

He looks away, fiddles with the paper wrapper of her straw, shredding it into dozens of tiny white pieces. She waits until he’s finished and has gathered them all into a neat-edged pile. “Spike. I thought I’d have to drag you back to my place so you wouldn’t run away. Why offer to go through all this trouble?”

He shrugs, hands hovering over the pile of paper. “Just… to be near you.”

She can’t breathe.

He looks up, finally. “’M a wanker, Buffy. Doesn’t mean I didn’t… that I don’t…”

Her gasp is less a gasp and more like the sound she makes when she’s been punched in the stomach.

“Miss you too,” he finishes.

If she feels strangely disappointed, she tries very hard not to notice.

\---

Buffy scuffs at the floor with the toe of her Converse. The motel room, as grimy as she expected, is close enough to the beach that there’s ancient sand embedded in the carpet. In the thick air, everything feels damp. Buffy leans against the bathroom doorframe as Spike shoves belongings into his duffel, not moving even when he rubs past her, chest to chest for a dizzy moment, to retrieve a pile of clothes from the bathtub. She’s too busy breathing past a surge of desire to ask him about why his clothes are in the bathtub.

She tails him silently as he checks out and starts walking back to her car, so she’s a few steps away when he tosses his bag into the trunk.

“Hang on.”

One hand poised on the trunk door, ready to slam it down, he freezes. “What’s wrong?”

Tilting her head, she says nothing, and then – there. A repetition of the scream she’d heard. She jerks her chin southward. “It came from over there.”

Spike nods, closes the trunk. “The beach.”

Past midnight on a weekday, the beach seems deserted, just the long waves curving up onto the sand. The weather’s been mild, and the tide is going out; the surf is low, the water quiet. In the large Malibu houses whose security lights she can see winking out through the thick darkness of the shore, the men are probably snoring louder. Hell, she’s slept next to guys who snored louder.

Not Spike. He’s a quiet breather. She tries not to think of him, asleep. Tries not to remember that she knows how he looks like that, when he stops fighting the world, stops fighting to be in it or of it.

He nods towards a messy pile of boulders, pulling her attention back. Right. Screaming.

Except there isn’t any now, and their steps are silent on the fine sand, with its detritus of cigarette butts and plastic wrappers and used condoms. Grains cling to Buffy’s damp skin wherever they touch: ankles, calves. Sweat rolls down her back.

Laughter, a whimper, and they round the boulders to see that a pack of fanged-out vampires have cornered a couple against the rocks. Buffy’s not sure why they’re not already dead, until one of the vampires says, “I ain’t sharing! You got dibs last time. This time, first blood is mine.”

“Actually,” says Buffy, leaning against a conveniently hip-high rock, “I think it’s mine.”

As soon as the vampires turn to her, she yells, “Run!” at the couple, and they waste no time, slip-sliding on the treacherous sand in their haste. She doesn’t wait to see them go; she and Spike turn back to back, instinctively, edging in tandem away from the rocks so they have room to maneuver. Six vampires in front of them, no problem.

She’s killed four before she realizes there _is_ a problem.

“Where are they all _coming_ from?” Spike says in the same moment. It’s true: there are now more enemies in front of them than there were a minute ago. The beach seems to be boiling with them, heaving darkly. She doesn’t have breath to answer, aiming a high kick at one vampire and blocking a downward punch from another that’s six foot five at the very least.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees that Spike is holding one in a headlock with his right arm; unable to get the stake in his left hand around to the vampire coming at him from the front, he’s forced to throw it, striking his target but losing the stake. He violently twists the neck of the vampire he’s trapped, and uses the momentum to swing his arm down to the stake she keeps tucked in her waistband, coming up armed and taking on a new enemy. “We can’t hold them, Slayer!”

Buffy knows. Her breathing is painful, now, gasps that tear at her throat and don’t seem to make it all the way to her lungs. With the humidity, she feels like she’s drowning on dry land. “We will.”

“Too bad we can’t bless the entire bloody ocean,” Spike grumbles. They’ve edged close enough to the water that incoming waves wash over their feet, eating away the sand they’re standing on. Spike stumbles – a miracle, really, because a vampire has picked up his dropped stake, and only Spike’s sudden movement saves him from having his dust scattered across the Pacific. The stake lodges higher in his chest, instead, just below his collarbone. He bellows, dropping momentarily to one knee.

“Spike!” Buffy dispatches one, two vampires to fight her way over, standing above him and desperately trying to block attacks from all sides.

“’M fine,” he says, popping back up beside her. He’s pulled the stake out and is now fighting with weapons in both hands, but she can see that his left arm is all but useless except as a buffer to hold off attacks. The bloodstain on his chest keeps spreading lower, until his shirt is plastered to the entire left side of his body.

Buffy moves to his weak side, keeps spinning, turning, staking and punching mechanically. They must have fought off thirty vampires by now, and still they come. What she wouldn’t do for Willow, now, not just her power but the fierceness of her anger and righteousness; for Xander, who would be swinging an axe awkwardly at her side while making instinctive Star Trek references; for Giles, the comfort of his warmth and strength and solidity; for Dawn, even, though she is thankful that Dawn is far, far away, that she won’t have to see her sister, broken and beaten and dead, blood seeping into the sand and staining the water of the Pacific red.

Another, and another. Buffy’s arms are like lead, painful to lift, every muscle shaking and tremulous, skin oily with sweat. The exhaustion lends her clarity, somehow; through the haziness of her vision, she can see only the enemies in front of her, break down their moves. Most of them are fledges, she realizes – it’s why she and Spike aren’t dead yet. They must have banded together for protection.

“It’s a gang,” she realizes, gasping it out. “Do vampires – have –” she grunts as she takes the force of a vampire’s punch and redirects it towards his buddy; both vampires go sprawling – “gangs?”

“Sure,” says Spike, voice flat with pain and fatigue, and his lack of elaboration tells Buffy more than anything else how close he is to his limit. Both of them are straining, grunting more and more frequently with exertion, their motions becoming broad and sloppy. Sweat and exhaustion have blurred Buffy’s vision, and she catches a vampire’s lunge toward her neck just in time, jamming a stake between them at the last moment.

“Spike…” she says.

“Now’s not a great time, pet,” he snarls through his fangs.

“Might not – get – another,” she says. Is the crowd of fanged faces finally getting smaller, or is it just her imagination? She can’t see anything beyond the next punch, the next kick, the next staking. Blisters are forming on the palm of her stake hand. The water is up to their knees now, she realizes: if they go much further, they’ll begin to lose their balance.

A thin line of sharp, bright pain across her ribs makes her gasp – one of the vampires has a knife, cutting deep enough that she feels the blade hit bone. Stumbling backward, she falls. Black, bitter water surges up around her ears, making Spike’s “Buffy!” sound like a distant gunshot echoing across a valley. A cool, restful valley. She closes her eyes.

And opens them, exploding upward, spluttering, staking the vampire that was leaning over her. It’s darker here, farther from the lights of the shore, and the ocean throws strange shards of light into her eyes, confusing her, but there are definitely way fewer vampires now.

“I’m okay,” she says to Spike. Light glints off the salt water on his face, a few paces away. She struggles through the water to reach him, placing herself at his injured left side again.

They have cut through all but a half-dozen enemies. A few minutes later, and the beach is silent again, except for the murmuring of the waves, now just at their back. They stand for a moment, stupefied, with the confusion of two people who expected to find themselves dead and don’t.

The stakes drop from Spike’s nerveless fingers, and he thumps to his knees in the sand, head hanging down, and makes a noise she’s never hear from him before: half a groan, half the sound a scream might make if it were trapped in someone’s throat.

“Spike,” she whispers, wavering on her feet. Before her legs can give out, she sinks down beside him.

He breathes harshly for a few more moments, eyes clenched shut. “Close.”

“Yeah,” says Buffy, suddenly unable to remain vertical any longer; she tilts toward him until her head and shoulder are pressed against his side. He grunts: it’s his left side. She tries, really, to move, but can’t summon the energy. She feels locked inside her useless muscles. Finally, he pushes her off just enough to lie down himself, and manages to settle both of them on their backs, her head touching the side of his shoulder.

She’s so exhausted that she thinks she nods off for a few minutes, before it occurs to her that it’s probably blood loss. She’s okay lying down, though. Above them, the sky is emptied of stars, the orange haze of light pollution crowding the horizons. Behind her, the sea turns the sand over, and over.

Eventually, she realizes that she’s still awake, and still alive, and is probably going to stay that way, at least for the foreseeable future. She throws an arm over her eyes. “I have to get home and shower so I can open the cafe.” Her throat feels dry as the sand above the high-tide line, coated with the dust of dozens of vampires.

She feels rather than sees him turn his head to look at her incredulously. “You’re kidding.”

“Haven’t missed a shift yet,” she says, and weakly attempts to push herself into a sitting position.

Despite his protests, Spike pushes on her back to help her, then struggles to his feet and offers a hand to her. Even if she’d wanted to refuse it, she isn’t proud enough, or stupid enough, and even then she stumbles getting to her feet. He glances over, sees the bloodstain that has consigned yet another of her outfits to the trash bin, swears, looks at his shirt and hers, both ripped to shreds, and swears again, more vividly this time. Shrugging out of his duster – wet, it must weigh a ton, Buffy thinks – pulls off what’s left of his shirt, and knots it around her torso, tight enough that it seizes her ribs as she breathes. The pressure on her wound makes the pain flare up, and she gasps a little.

“Come on,” Spike says, “We’ll lean on each other,” which is how they make their way back to the car. He’s cool, from the ocean, pretty much the only thing in the night that is, and she finds herself clinging on even as they fetch up like flotsam against the side of the SUV. In her exhaustion, she feels drunk, on the edge of everything, half-dreaming. They drift apart just a little, enough that she finds her fingers trailing through the hair on the back of his head, the soft hair he doesn’t gel down. Gently, she brushes the backs of her fingers up and down the place where it meets his nape. He shivers. Closes his eyes.

She reaches up to touch his cheek, to turn his head to hers, and she kisses him.

He tastes like salt brine and sun-warmed sand and breakfast sausage and nicotine, and her body is heavy against his, the places where they touch sweet and sharp, and she never, ever wants to stop.

Reaching past him, she fumbles blindly for the handle of the rear door, gets it open, and pushes him inside. They sprawl inelegantly across the seats, too long, too tall, too many limbs knocking against the backrests and falling off towards the floor mats, but she can’t stop trying to pull him closer, as if the heat will fuse them together and she’ll never wake up alone again, never wonder where he is or what he’s doing or if he’s not thinking of her. Her hair drips onto his face and clings to her cheek and the back of her neck.

Soon, though, her motions drift into laziness and sleepiness, until she’s only really managing to keep her mouth against his by dint of gravity. Eventually, even that gives out, and she just rests her forehead against his cheek while his hands stroke slowly up and down her back.

“Slayer,” he says, softly, startling her out of a doze.

“Mm,” she says.

“I’m going to drive us back to your apartment.”

“No moving,” she mumbles, inarticulately.

“Buffy. I need you to tell me where you live.”

She groans, shakes her head a little to try to clear it. More than anything, she wants to remain right where she is. The discomfort, the heat, the damp, the stickiness and sandiness and ripping pain over her ribs seems to pale in comparison to having to move. She moves anyway, forcing herself upright. “Yeah.”

Somehow, they disentangle from each other, slither back onto the pavement, and pour themselves into the front seats. It’s after two a.m., and the streets are quiet, though not deserted because this is L.A., after all. Cars and drunk pedestrians and trucks and ambulances and cop cars whizz by. With a rare, aching pull, like her heart is being torn sideways, Buffy misses Sunnydale at night: the cool breeze, the calm playgrounds, the silent, neat houses, the serenity of a cemetery smelling of damp earth and new grass, the knowledge of her mother, waiting for her in the kitchen with the lights lit to guide her home.

She gives Spike quiet directions, and he parks illegally, in front of a hydrant right next to her building. She can’t bring herself to complain.

Inside, he glances around the studio – the kitchen, just inside the door, and its breakfast bar; the baggy sofa and IKEA coffee table comprising, by themselves, the entire living room; one nightstand and the double bed, with the mattress she’d stolen from a fellow Slayer she’d roomed with in Colorado for two months, three years ago; the wood floors, clean and bare of rugs – and announces, “I’ll take the couch.”

Buffy, looking at him, remembers all over again that they aren’t comfortable here, around each other, that they’re carting around this history and this weight and these unspoken issues, and somehow manages to feel even more tired.

“You know what, Spike? Do what you want. Take the couch, take the bed, take the floor, go sleep in the car, I don’t give a shit. I’m going to shower.”

The cool water feels as close to heaven as she’s gotten since she last woke up in a coffin, and the half-decent water pressure she gets in this apartment rinses the sand and salt out of her hair, though it stings against the gaping wound in her side that she probably shouldn’t be soaking like this, now that she thinks about it. Her thoughts circle, slowly, like a heavy swimmer, around that moment in the water, a metallic taste in her mouth, salt and brine and blood. She rests her forehead against the cold tiles and stays there until she feels herself drifting off on her feet.

She stuffs the entire outfit she’d been wearing, shoes and all, into the bathroom trashcan. Then, wound dressed, wearing a pair of underwear and a long t-shirt – she’s been keeping the temperature in the apartment a few degrees warmer than she’d really prefer, to save on electricity bills – she drags herself out into the main room and leans her hip against the bed, searching Spike out.

He can’t hide the way his eyes dip to her legs, exposed past mid-thigh, and she can’t pretend away her resulting flush, but even that makes her exhausted: the inevitability, the sad, complicated familiarity with where this will lead them. Breaking her gaze away from his now-sheepish one, she collapses on the bed, half on her stomach and half on her good side.

“Your turn,” she mutters into the pillow. “First aid kit in the medicine cabinet,” and is asleep before he replies.

She comes awake again a little when the shower turns off, and idly listens to the sounds Spike makes as he moves around the bathroom: the clanging of the towel ring as he pulls the extra towel down, a half-minute of silence as he dries himself, the medicine cabinet opening, the rustle of gauze. It’s probably awkward for him to bandage an injury with only one hand. She imagines him trying to hold the gauze in place with his chin as he – there’s the rasp of it – tears off some strips of tape, but she doesn’t get up to help him.

The next silence is long enough that she’s mostly unconscious when he emerges. For a moment, she thinks she feels his fingertips hovering over her shirt where it’s hiding the bandage, ghosting over her cheek, but she can’t be sure, and then she’s away from him, and asleep.

\---

The alarm goes off less than an hour later. She catches herself in time to stop her instinctive groan. No reason to wake up Spike if she doesn’t have to; he’ll be stuck inside for the day soon whether he comes with her or not. She’s mostly expecting that he’ll have given up his stupid plan of trailing her to work like a puppy, especially when the grogginess and lack of sleep hit him, or that he’ll at least be late getting ready and she’ll have an excuse to leave him at home. But no – when she’s ready to go, he’s already waiting by the door, sand-crusted shoes on, still-soaked duster heavy over a fresh shirt and jeans.

An L.A. miracle: they haven’t gotten a parking ticket in the last two hours, and the heat means that their seats have mostly dried out already, though the car smells like brine and sweat. Buffy rolls down both windows and pulls onto the street. It’s the coolest it’s been all day, in this hour before dawn, not that it’ll last long. The wind along her cheek feels soothing. It does nothing to wake her up. _Coffee soon_ , she thinks, blinking against oncoming headlights.

She’s opening alone this morning, so there’s no one to ask questions about Spike – a small mercy, since it means it’ll take her an extra half-hour to set up the store. Spike helps, obeying her quiet instructions about laying out the cup lids and pulling the chairs off the tables as she switches on the sleek espresso machine and steamer.

The sun comes up not long after her first few customers sleep-walk out the door with their orders – hot, black, and traditional for the earliest risers, usually – but Spike has found himself a corner where the sun won’t reach. Feet propped up, reading a newspaper, he sips the iced mocha that he paid for without even asking, his duster hung on a chair to dry. When Emily comes in at six to help Buffy with the morning rush, she nods towards him, and says, “Early for a camper. How long’s he been here?”

“Since open. I know him. He’s hanging out until I get off.”

Emily raises her eyebrows. She looks unfairly good for six a.m., but then, she always looks good. Buffy forgives her for it when she says, “That’s some friend. Hey, Colin and I baked cupcakes last night and I brought you a couple.”

Buffy doesn’t wait, glancing surreptitiously at the momentarily-deserted café before tearing open the Ziploc and stuffing half a cupcake in her mouth before a customer can walk in. “You are a goddess,” she says around the crumbs, and makes sure she saves the other one for Spike.

By the time Joey shows up – looking even gayer than usual in a purple fedora – and she can go on break, Spike’s duster has dried enough that the sea salt is showing in crooked waves and streaks across the leather. She brings him some paper towels and a cup of water so he can wipe it down, and sits with him in the quiet of shared fatigue, squinting out the window at the way the heat haze throws glare up off the asphalt.

Working on the crossword, he eats half the cupcake without looking at it and pushes the rest toward her.

She frowns. “You must be hungry.”

His glance up is quick, and fails to be casual. “I’ll hold. Said I’d take you for lunch, remember?”

Buffy crosses her arms on the table and pillows her head on them. “Too tired for lunch. I’ll stop at the butcher’s on our way home, though.”

She thinks he might protest – at the suggestion itself or the casual use of “our” – but instead he just says, “Okay,” without looking up again.

Buffy bites her lip until it hurts, but nothing is better by then, so she hisses heatedly, “Why are you being so _difficult_?”

Tilting his head in confusion, Spike clearly tries to take a few seconds to work that one out, and fails. “ _What_?”

Even through her ever-present exhaustion, which makes her body – now beginning to really, really ache, whenever she moves it even a little, and even when she doesn’t – heavy and dreamy and disassociated, and makes her mind soupy and her thoughts slow, Buffy knows she’s being unfair. But she cried on him, and kissed him, and brought him home with her, and sitting across from him now, she is still unfairly, desperately, undeniably attracted to him, and she’s _embarrassed_ about it all, honestly – because what, she can’t manage to see an ex (is he an ex?) without losing her shit completely? – and all he’s done is maybe admit, sort of, that he missed her, a little, and she doesn’t even know if he hates her guts or wants to stay or is waiting for night so that he can get back to his DeSoto and drive somewhere he’ll never see her again.

So, yeah. She’s okay with being unfair.

“Spike. Figure out what you want to say to me, and say it. Or if there’s nothing you want to explain, then leave. Because I have better things to do with my time.”

Spike is staring at her, frozen. She waits, five seconds, maybe ten. He says nothing. Doesn’t move.

“Fine,” she says, looking away because he can always, _always_ see right through her. Even when he hated her. Hates her.

Her break is over, anyway. She slaps a hand down on the table, levers herself upright – she hasn’t ached this much from a tough patrol in _years_ – and turns back to the counter.

“Slayer.” His eyes skitter onto her face, and then off it, and she looks down. He’s holding out the half a cupcake. “Get some food into you, yeah?”

She’s tempted to knock it out of his hand, but she’d just have to sweep it up, so instead she turns and walks to the back room to don her apron again.

\---

When she clocks out at eleven-thirty, he’s still there. She tries not to think much of it.

The narrow back alley is mostly in shade, so she smuggles Spike out of the delivery entrance and drives home with him lying on the floor of the backseat, his duster covering his face. She considers purposefully leaving the air conditioner off so that the car gets unbearably hot, and what stops her isn’t the pettiness of it, but that he’s a vampire with no body heat to trap under the jacket and probably wouldn’t care regardless.

She leaves the car running in a shaded no-parking delivery zone outside the butcher’s while she runs in. She takes long enough deciding how much blood to buy – just for tonight? Is he staying? Does she _want_ that? Will he feel awkward if she buys enough for a week? She should probably just get enough for tonight and tomorrow, right? – that she panics about getting a parking ticket she can’t afford and ends up just shoving all the cash Spike gave her across the counter and walking out with way too much.

In her apartment, she stashes it – bags and all – in the fridge, and goes to rinse off the pervasive smell of coffee and sugar (still so much better than Doublemeat grease) without looking at Spike. When she comes out, cooler, smelling now mostly of coconut body wash, he’s –

“Are you _cooking_?”

He doesn’t even bother with a response, stirring something on the stovetop. She peeks over his shoulder: he’s pulled together the tomatoes, a remaining half an onion, and a can of chickpeas, simmering them with some spices while he waits on – she checks the other pot – the rice to finish steaming. “Since when do you cook?” He shrugs, hunting through her cabinet for salt and pepper. “On the left.”

“Picked it up here and there. Refreshed my skills, cooking for Dawn the summer you –” Buffy’s gut twists, and she stares at the chickpea she’d fished out of the pan while he was talking, suddenly unable to eat it. Spike takes a breath and finishes, deliberately, “The summer you were dead.”

He says the last word carefully, the way one would test the ice on a frozen lake to see if it will break. Except it isn’t ice, here, but him, and her, and whatever holds the two of them together, whatever cord of love and hate and desire and despair keeps them whipping around each other like the two cannonballs in a chain shot.

When nothing happens, no thunderclap, no yelling, no sound of a heart breaking louder than the sizzle of tomatoes in the pan, he says, “I’d make dinner, sometimes, if the witches had evening class.”

Buffy has never been more grateful for a pot of rice to be finished cooking, because as he spoons it out onto a plate, she has a minute to breathe, to feel her feet against the floorboards and her hair, wet down the back of her t-shirt. She’s crushed the chickpea between her fingers, and because she has nothing better to do with it, she pops it into her mouth.

“Thank you,” she says. “Again. For that.” Setting down the plate on the breakfast bar, he nods, once, sharply, then seems to decide that that isn’t enough.

“Welcome.” He clears his throat. “Lunch?”

Buffy smiles, trying to lighten the mood. “What is your obsession with feeding me?” she asks, boosting herself onto a stool as Spike fetches himself some blood out of the fridge. “Mugs are in the cabinet by the microwave.”

“Haven’t had normal food in awhile.” She notices he doesn’t say _people food_ , and her heart, out of nowhere, aches for him a little. It hasn’t been so long since he got his soul back, since he had to relearn himself. Again. “Might not taste like much to me, most of the time anyway, but it smells good. Missed it, a little.”

Buffy, having already discovered that her meal is delicious, is busily stuffing her face with it, and the smell of warming blood in the microwave doesn’t even register. “Why no food?” she asks, mouth full. “Where’ve you been?”

She suddenly realizes what, precisely, that question entails, and freezes, cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk. Spike, eyes on the microwave timer, says nothing until he pulls out his mug and settles down on the stool next to her. Slowly, Buffy starts chewing again until she’s able to swallow. “Spike.” She waits until he raises his eyes from his mug and looks at her. “Where were you?”

She thinks he’s not going to answer. Again. But after a moment in which he swirls his mug and watches the blood leave high-tide marks on the inside, he says, “After… L.A., Angel’s crew broke up. Went our own ways. Angel went to Giles in London – you know. Fred was dead. Wesley was dead.”

Buffy jumps a little, at that. She’d seen him so rarely when he was alive that she sometimes forgets he’s dead.

Spike frowns. “You didn’t…? I thought Giles –”

She nods. “He did. I do. Know, I mean.”

“How much?”

She pushes rice around on her plate. “Plot and characters.”

“Good enough. Anyway, they all went wherever, and I was alone. Realized it was the first time I’d _been_ alone.”

“Since when?” Buffy takes another bite. It’s surprisingly nice, to have a meal she didn’t have to cook.

He’s silent for a minute, and her chewing sounds loud in her ears. “Ever,” he says, quietly. “When I was alive, there was my mother, and then Dru, and Angel and Darla. And then you.”

Buffy swallows. “And then Angel again.”

“And his crew, yeah. So I wanted to know… if I could. How it felt.” He takes a sip of blood, pensive.

Staring at her plate, in her tiny studio apartment, thousands of miles from her friends, Buffy whispers, “Like me.”

She knows him well enough to recognize the pleading behind his eyes. “That’s why I didn’t…”

Buffy isn’t sure if she forgives him, but she understands him, and it’s hard to still be angry. On the thought, she’s suddenly even more ravenous, and she digs into her food again. “So where did you go?”

Next to her, Spike relaxes, and she realizes how much tension he’d been carrying, in his neck and shoulders and spine, leg muscles constantly bunched beneath him like a racehorse behind the starting gate. “Wanted to go somewhere new. Got a car – piece of shit, practically broken down, but got it real cheap off this Himlin demon over in South L.A. – anyway, got this car and drove to Vancouver.”

“ _Canada_? They have much of a vampire problem up there?”

He shrugs. “Not so you’d notice. You’d expect a certain demon population in the higher latitude, long nights and all, but normally, we vamps are drawn to your milder climes. Maybe something to do with being so cold-blooded, as it were. Still, you always find a few gangs of hardy ones braving the cold. Russia, northern Germany. Less so in Canada. Lower murder rate, difficult to blend in. And it’s hard to make a speedy exit if you get caught. Bloody huge country, it’s ages between cities.” He takes another gulp of blood; now that he’s more relaxed, he seems to actually taste it, and grimaces.

“Cinnamon and cayenne in the spice drawer, if that’ll help.”

“Cheers, love. Anyway,” he says, getting up to root around in the drawer, “there _were_ a few vamp brothels in Toronto. Cleared those out – know how you feel about ‘em.”

He doesn’t seem to realize he’s said anything out of the ordinary, but the admission hits Buffy hard enough that she fumbles her fork. Everything he’d done, he’d done it thinking of what she’d want. Of what she’d think of him.

Spike doesn’t notice, returning with the spices and a spoon. “Killed a few Silyaks in Winnipeg – they’re ice demons, they were pulling down snow on the city. To make it homier, like.”

Buffy breathes out, recovering. “The residents must have been pleased.”

Spike frowns, stirring his blood. “Don’t think they noticed, to be honest, it being so cold there in the first place.”

“You spent four years in Canada?”

“Almost two. Liked the long nights myself. So, when it started getting warmer in the spring again, I went down to South Africa for a season. Then up to Sweden and Norway. Back down to New Zealand for the summer – winter, whatever – and then to northern Asia. Came here from Mongolia.”

“Why did you come back to L.A.? And in the summer? It’s hot as balls here.” Out of food, she takes a few sips of water.

“Bloke I know in Venice Beach said he ran across a black DeSoto like mine. Same year, same model, everything. I came over to have a look. ‘S why I was bunking round there.”

“You came halfway around the world… for a _car_?”

He shrugs. “Well, yeah. Didn’t know you were here, did I?”

A strange sensation takes over Buffy’s lower abdomen. “Oh.” She scrambles off her stool and grabs her plate.

“Bloody hell!” Spike’s hand darts out and grips her wrist, hard, as she picks up the plate. She pulls her arm roughly out of his grip. “I didn’t mean –” He lets her go, which is the only reason she hesitates, waiting for him to finish. “Bollixed that one. I meant, if I’d known you were here, you’d’ve been the reason I came. Not the car.”

Buffy looks at him: his eyes are wide, earnest, desperate. She realizes it’s an expression she’s seen on his face fairly often. She wishes she were less familiar with it. Something about it makes her feel guilty, and ashamed.

Now, though, she mostly feels foolish, moving her eyes to the empty plate she’s holding. “Oh,” she says, again, and puts it back down on the breakfast bar. “So…” She swallows. “You’re done? With the travelling? And the…” _Being alone_ , she doesn’t say.

Spike’s gaze is steady, because she didn’t have to say it. “Reckon so, yeah.”

She runs a finger along the edge of the plate, watching its progress, but she’s still hyper-aware of him as he stands and moves beside her, close enough that she’d feel his body heat if he had any. “And?” she asks, and turns her head to meet his eyes, which is a mistake. “How was it? Do you feel different?”

His huff of breath disturbs the fine strands of hair framing her face, and he reaches up with the backs of his fingers to nudge them back. “Not really. Not mostly.” He doesn’t look away, but manages to quirk an eyebrow toward the greater part of her studio in a trick of facial mobility that would astound a Broadway actor. His hand hasn’t moved, fingertips just barely touching the side of her cheek. “And you, with the spreading your wings. How do you feel?”

It would be easy to be glib, to be cruel, to be afraid of him, this, everything. She is, most of the time. But for the first time in years, she devotes serious consideration to the question – the literal question he’s asked, not whatever game they’re playing with each other, under the surface. Thinks of her friends, drifting away from her, her family smaller and more distant, her isolated life, her daily work, her nightly calling. “Older,” she whispers.

It takes barely a twitch of his muscles to move his hand an inch and cup her cheek, his broad, calloused thumb brushing lightly against the thin skin under her lashes, which she knows is shadowed with purple, and up towards the corner of her eye, where she’s noticed crow’s feet beginning to show themselves after two years of squinting into the L.A. sun. “Don’t look it,” he says, softly.

“Neither do you,” she tries to joke – and fails, because it comes out quiet and gravelly, with the longing in it audible even to her. On the next swipe of his thumb, Spike’s fingers drag, barely touching, lightly across her skin, from behind her ear down her neck. Goosebumps explode along their path, and down her shoulder and arm. Buffy’s knees almost give out, the low-level desire she’s been feeling – that she’s always feeling, near him – suddenly slamming into her like an unexpected ocean wave, the surf that keeps pulling you under. She trembles. Thinks of Dracula, before he bit her, how she couldn’t look away, if she’d wanted to. How she hadn’t wanted to.

_Thrall_ , she remembers, Giles’s voice in her head, is from an old word meaning _slave_.

They can’t do this. Fall back into bed as though – not as though nothing has happened. But as though it’s a thing they do, she and whoever Spike is now, was, has been for the past few years. The last time they were in bed – well, no, the last time they had sex, because there was the two nights before Sunnydale collapsed, when he held her, and she held him, and they stripped each other of any pretense of history, and let their naked fear comfort each other in the darkness – was before that moment in the bathroom, his departure, his soul, his death. She’s never slept with the person standing in front of her.

And there’s one question she hasn’t asked, and he hasn’t answered yet (the same one, she’s aware, that she never really has).

“I _feel_ older,” he whispers. “Felt every second passing. _Buffy_.” Catching her by surprise, he moves forward, but not to kiss her – to clutch her to him, bury his face in the crook of her neck. “I missed you so much,” he mumbles into her skin, the resulting vibrations against her neck not doing anything to abate her arousal.

For all the ways he feels new, different, unfamiliar, there are certain things she knows. One of those things: if she were to run a finger along the shell of his ear, he’d turn to pliable goo in her arms. It seems unfair, somehow, to use this knowledge right now.

And she’s waiting, still, for something else.

Spike takes a breath, draws back a little, eyes red but dry, and steps back just enough to put some air between them. He looks strange, Buffy thinks, and then, as he opens his mouth, and closes it again, she places it: afraid.

She realizes that if she wants him to answer the one outstanding question, this time she’ll have to go first.

“Spike,” she starts, and grabs his hand, flipping it over and tracing patterns on his palm with a fingertip, to give herself something else to look at. She wishes, a little, that he hadn’t stepped back. “I –” She swallows, but he lets her continue pressing abstract shapes on his palm. “When you died, or –” she frowns, suddenly confused – “or I thought you died, in Sunnydale, when I said… what I said…” _Come on, Buffy_. She grits her teeth. _Grow up. You can do better than that._

“When I said I loved you. I wasn’t lying. But I wasn’t _not_ lying.” She feels him freeze beside her, and rushes on. “I didn’t know for sure. I didn’t know _you_ enough to know for sure. You, Spike-with-a-soul. We didn’t – we didn’t have enough time together, at the end.”

She waits for him to say something, ask something, do something. Just “Ah,” or “And now?” or pull his hand away – she finds herself gripping it so tightly her knuckles are white, and forces herself to unclench her muscles, one by one. But he just stands, unmoving, silent.

“I want to. Have time.” She swallows, again, and looks at him. For once, his face is a closed book. She was never as good at reading him as he was at seeing through her. “Know for sure.”

Still, he says nothing. She waits, a moment, another, and then drops his hand, and takes one small, extremely painful step back. It feels like something is clawing at her stomach, ripping huge tears in the delicate tissues of her insides.

“Okay,” she says. “Well. That’s what – I wanted to say. It’s… probably not what you wanted to hear. It’s, not fair. To you. You can – if, if you want to leave, I’d understand.”

Finally, he makes a sound of some kind. It’s a weird, humourless, unbelieving laugh, and it hurts her to hear it. She winces, raises her shoulder a little, instinctively, as if she needs it to ward off a blow.

“You’re right,” he says, voice loud and harsh. “’S not what I wanted to hear.” Numb, Buffy turns away from him, staring sightlessly at the kitchen sink, the sponge, the dish soap, the pans still on the stove. A grain of rice clings to the lip of the pot.

She hears him sigh. When a hand grips her shoulder, she jumps, and forgets not to let it turn her back around. Spike is seeking her gaze, but she can’t manage to let hers land anywhere in the vicinity of his face, her eyes skipping from over his shoulder, to his shirt collar, to the hollow of his neck, which flutters as he swallows.

“But it’s not far off,” he says.

She’s surprised into looking into his eyes then, and they look just the same as she remembers from years before. Same colour, same pale lashes. Same emotion.

“I love you,” he says. “Still. Always. Even when you’re tearing me to shreds.”

It’s a moment before she can reply. “So… you’ll stay?” She doesn’t even try to not sound desperate.

“Never had the intention of doing anything else.”

Silence stretches. Buffy knows what should come next, after heartfelt confessions, but the moment feels too intense for them to move closer, for their lips to meet. When she nods, briskly, and steps back, they both seem relieved.

Running one hand through his hair, Spike lets out a shaky breath, and then picks up her abandoned lunch plate and carries it to the sink.

“Going to insist you buy some more food, though,” he says, over the sound of the water beginning to run.

Unable to trust her shaking knees any longer, Buffy boosts herself onto the counter. “Payday tomorrow,” she says.

“When’s your shift?”

“Normal time. Three to close. I’ll do the pots.”

Spike shrugs. “No worries. Go on and get some kip before patrol.”

For a moment, Buffy is gobsmacked. Not at the sudden mundanity (dishes, work schedules, _naps_ ) but at how well he understands her. Willow, Xander, Giles, Dawn – they’ve all known her for years, a _decade_ , but they be shocked, horrified, if she suggested patrol the night after taking down fifty vamps and nearly dying. Spike automatically assumed that she’d go.

She’s seized with a rush of strangely chaste affection for him, and she has to instinctively fight the temptation not to leap down from the counter and hug him from behind. And then, recognizing that instinct, she thinks, _Well, that’ll take some getting used to_ , and hops down to kiss him on the cheek energetically and scoot away again.

Spike raises a soapy hand to the cheek her lips have just vacated, looking awestruck. “What’s all this, then?”

“Thank you!” she throws over her shoulder as she kicks off her shoes beside the bed. “You’ll join me?”

“For patrol?” he asked, dropping her silverware into the drying rack. “Or for your nap?”

“Yes,” she says, and he smiles.


End file.
